


i had a dream that you were gone

by gettingthatyellowjaundice



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M, Paranormal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25615618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gettingthatyellowjaundice/pseuds/gettingthatyellowjaundice
Summary: “Come eat with me,” Eugene pleads, “Come eat with me, then come to bed with me, it’s cold sometimes in this apartment.”Snafu doesn’t answer him, and Eugene eats alone on the sofa, staring blankly at the black-and-white tv his parents bought him for Christmas last year, thinking: heaven help me, he’s going to be the end of me. Heaven help me, I loved him.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	i had a dream that you were gone

The window is open when Eugene wakes. Light spills in, tinted purple and gray. Snafu’s sitting in the windowsill shirtless, with his feet dangling some fifty feet above the city, with a cigarette in his hand. His thin shoulders are drawn up to his neck, that way he has of holding himself like he’s just been startled, yet limbless, and loose, at the same time. Eugene shifts and the blankets make a sound, but Snafu doesn’t seem to hear. He stays sitting there, looking out at the city and the smoke that rises from the factories early in the morning. There are goosebumps on his bare shoulders.

“It’s cold,” Eugene says.

Snafu turns around. His eyes seem silver in the half-light.

“I know,” he says. There’s blood matted in his hair. He turns away again, kicks his bare feet against the side of the building. It can’t be any later than five, there’s hours yet before the alarm goes off. 

“Why don’t you come to bed,” Eugene asks him. 

“Shut it. Let me be.”

Snafu’s dark head leans against the windowsill. He coughs. Eugene wants to go to him and kiss the part of his neck where it’s bent, smell the smoke and dawn in his hair. He wants to say something to him that was very important, but forgets what it was, and closes his eyes again without saying the missing words, wonders, in his sleep, what they are and to whom that shape in the windowsill belongs.

-

When Eugene wakes for the second time, the window is closed and the curtains are drawn. He dresses quietly without turning the lights on. He can hardly make out the shape of his own limbs in the grainy dark. It’s a quarter to eight when he pours a cup of coffee and locks his door behind him to make the eight o’clock train, and walks alone down his apartment stairs, his footsteps echoing against the walls.

-

“You served in the Pacific, you said?”

“That’s right.”

She smiles and ducks her head. Her mouth is dark and sweet.

“I always had a thing for men in uniform.”

Eugene laughs and asks her if she’d like another cup of coffee, she says yes please, let’s talk a while longer. She slides her feet closer to his under the table. He feels her little oxfords bump against his ankles, laughs again. 

Her name is Louise. She sits next to him in biology class, has such bright eyes, asks the professor such strange questions. They’d not spoken until today, but she’d watched him out of the corner of her eye, and it was she who had stopped him on the quad after class and asked him if he’d like to get coffee with her. It was he who had said yes, begged forgiveness from the dead under his breath.

“I like you, you know,” she says, very softly. The tip of her nose is still pink from the cold outside. He tells her he likes her too. She smiles, her lipstick cracks, and he thinks of Snafu’s neck bent against the dawn, his slitted eyes. 

-

Snafu is there again when Eugene comes home that night, still with blood matted in his hair. He turns around when Eugene walks in this time. He has a vacant, wild look in his eyes.

“Turn the radio on,” he begs. “It’s too damn quiet in here. Has been all day. Feels like I’m goin’ out of my mind.”

“Sure.”

Eugene stops on the first song that comes on, a slow, sweet waltz from his parents’ time. Snafu raises an eyebrow, and Eugene shrugs. It has a velvety sound, feels as if it slips in between his skin and out past the barriers of the bones.

“Could’ve picked the song yourself if you were gonna be so choosy about it,” he tells Snafu, and Snafu laughs.

Snafu stays sitting in the windowsill all evening, blowing smoke out into the night from the cigarette that never seems to go out, while Eugene heats a pot of pasta on the stove. He forgets to turn on the lights until he realizes he can’t see his hands in front of his face. He goes to turn them on, but stops by the window, just inches away from Snafu’s cold skin, hardly dares touch him but aches to. His face is lit by starlight, and, oh - and his vacant, shifting eyes, the unmarred shape of his throat. Eugene could almost touch him now, he’s so alive.

“Anybody ever tell you you were handsome?” He asks him.

Snafu laughs, his teeth dark with blood.

“My maman, sure. Nobody else, though.”

“Come eat with me,” Eugene pleads, “Come eat with me, then come to bed with me, it’s cold sometimes in this apartment.”

Snafu doesn’t answer him, and Eugene eats alone on the sofa, staring blankly at the black-and-white tv his parents bought him for Christmas last year, thinking: heaven help me, he’s going to be the end of me. Heaven help me, I loved him. 

-

It had happened very quickly. There had been a splatter of black rain, Snafu’s half-open mouth, the sound of a bullet and a grunt, then nothing more, then silence. Eugene had almost moved in time but didn’t, and this, he’d written in his bible, is proof that God exists but that He does not love us. They left Snafu’s body in the mud with a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. For the next life, Burgie had said, and Eugene had cursed.

Even so, Snafu had followed him across the Pacific, across the islands, a man of his word. Eugene had woken three nights later to find Snafu kneeling in the mud with blood still in his hair, eyes fixed like stars.

“Sledge,” Snafu had whispered, “Sledgehammer, c’mon, wake up. Your watch.”

Eugene had opened his mouth, had felt sick, ugly, but did not make a sound. There was some green boot sleeping beside him. His skin was quite soft in the light and Eugene did not want it to be roughened by the blood on Snafu’s face. He remembers he had whispered Snafu’s name, all of it - Merriell like the sea, and Shelton, and Snafu, and all the names he knew Snafu answered to. Snafu had smiled. It was a strange smile, very dark in color, sharp around the edges. Eugene had reached to trace the lines of his face, but Snafu had jerked away. 

“You can’t,” he explained softly, and Eugene didn’t ask what he meant. He almost opened his mouth to tell him - _I watched you die, it was in the corner of my eye, you ought to apologize for that, I watched you die_ \- but he didn’t. There was sweat pooled in Snafu’s collarbone as if he were still caught in the moment of the bullet, the crack and the cry, in the hot rain when Eugene almost moved fast enough but didn’t. It was ugly. It was cruel and pointless and ugly. 

“I’ve had enough of war,” Eugene had whispered, trembling. Snafu had shrugged.

“Ain’t we all?”

“I’ve had _enough_.”

“Oh, quit your whinin’.”

And he’d dogged Eugene’s footsteps after that, his shadow, his echo. Had followed him to China and on, to the trains, to Mobile, to California. Eugene had never thought to ask him to go. 

-

Snafu's lips are cold when he imagines them now but perhaps if he had moved fast enough they might have been warm, still touched with tropical rain, soft and perhaps pliant, or perhaps not. Perhaps Snafu would never have been pliant, not even for him.

-

Louise calls the next morning. He forgets having given her his number, but she sounds bright and alive, and something in him yearns for that. 

"Meet by the museum at two?" She says. He glances at the empty windowsill, the curtains moving softly with the breeze.

"Sure," he says.

It's uncharacteristically sunny for November when he gets there, white sun spilling across the square, pushed onward by a freezing wind. She smiles when she sees him. He smiles back. She's wearing the same dark lipstick from yesterday, sweet, slightly cracked. 

"I was worried you wouldn't come," she says. "You sounded so nervous on the phone."

“Why wouldn't I come?"

“Oh, I don't know. You're very strange, that's all. I mean it as a good thing, of course.”

He kisses her that afternoon, and he's calling Snafu's name through his teeth as he does, in apology or in longing, he does not know, but she doesn't hear him, and after, she stands clutching his hands to her chest and breathing very hard. He feels miserable and guilty. He wants to marry her. He wants to feel Snafu in his arms again. He doesn't know what he wants. He invites her back for dinner, and she comes.

She throws the curtains open, turns on the lights, leaves the front door ajar, declares _it's like a mortuary in here_. He shrugs and smiles. They make dinner together with their hips brushing, her hair frizzy from the rising steam. She smells like old books, he presses his nose into her neck and breathes it in, grateful that this one, at least, he is allowed to touch. That God might not love them but that He pities them from time to time, as He ought to.

“Don’t go,” he pleads when she turns to put her coat on. “Please. It’s a long walk back and it’s dark outside.”

“You don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind.”

She stays. 

That night, in bed with her, he dreams of Snafu dying. He can't see his face because the rain is falling in pelts and it’s too dark to see, and it doesn’t matter anymore besides. But Snafu is dying and his eyes are wide open and Eugene asks him if he’s looking at God. No, he says, no, no. His voice threads through the open hole in his chest and spills out the other side, black with blood, tainted. His hands are turning gray and Eugene wraps them in his own, kisses each knuckle thrice - once for good luck, once for grief, and once for holy pardon - and the crack of gunfire sounds behind them, the foreign trees bending at their roots and Snafu's eyes are bright, glassy, colorless.

No, he keeps whispering. No, no, no.

Eugene presses closer with a shudder like the jerk of a gun (the bullet leaves the barrel and a soldier turns as the last breath of his life leaves him, though of course he doesn’t know it’s his last, they never do), and Snafu stills beside him. Snafu stills, his endless chorus (no, no, no) ceases, and Eugene turns him over in the mud so that nobody will ever see his face again, not until they find the bleached bones of a boy still wrapped in his uniform fifty years from now when the guns have stopped smoking, and if they write nothing else down, if they never write a single damned book about the war, they must write this: he loved him.

-

Sometimes he thinks the moment will never end, that Snafu will never abandon his shadow, the last bullet will never stop leaving the barrel, that he will be twenty-one and watching Snafu die forever, his black blood will stain the sea forever, Eugene will never stop asking him if he sees God in the shadow of war and Snafu will never stop telling him: no, no, no. 


End file.
